InstallAware

We are very close to making a purchase decison in favor of IA. But, the final install we are targeting must be < 1Mb to get on the partner CDs we're targeting.

My problem is, I can't seem to produce an IA install that is less than 1MB, even if it includes a 1 byte file.

How do I produce the absolute minimum size install for a 1 character file with IA?

And what size would you expect the final .exe to be? In other words, how much overhead does IA add in the minimal case?

Dean

Hi Dean,

You can try building an empty setup to see what the minimum size will be. Note that different themes will change your setup size, so be sure to try out a few.

Per your suggestion, I built an empty install with best compression. The resulting size of the unaltered empty project is 1064KB. At first, I thought surely I'm missing some option to trim things down. But it seems InstallAware really does add 1MB of overhead. Can that be correct?

Dean

I think you can bring that overhead down to around 900 KB, but there is an overhead because InstallAware handles things like compression and partial web downloads internally, since MSI does not have support for these by default. Therefore, it might make it less attractive for you if your application is very small - although with larger files this overhead disappears and the better compression yields amazing savings.